Muriel sobbed with her face toward the camera. Burns
commanded her to pick up the saddle, and Muriel picked up the saddle
and flung it spitefully upon the back of the sorrel.

"Oh, you forgot the blanket!" exclaimed Jean, and stopped herself with
her hand over her too-impulsive mouth, just as Burns stopped the camera.

The director bowed his head and shook it twice slowly and with much
meaning. He did not say anything at all; no one said anything. Gil
Huntley looked at Jean and tried to catch her eye, so that he might
give her some greeting, or at least a glance of understanding. But
Jean was wholly concerned with the problem which confronted Muriel. It
was a shame, she thought, to expect a girl,--and when she had reached
that far she straightway put the thought into speech, as was her habit.

"It's a shame to expect that girl to do something she doesn't know how
to do," she said suddenly to Robert Grant Burns. "Work at something
else, why don't you, and let me take her somewhere and show her how?
It's simple--"

"Get up and show her now," snapped Burns, with some sarcasm and a good
deal of exasperation. "You seem determined to get into the foreground
somehow; get up and go through that scene and show us how a girl gets a
saddle on a horse."

Jean sat still for ten seconds and deliberated while she looked from
him to the horse. Again she made a picture that drove its elusive
quality of individuality straight to the professional soul of Robert
Grant Burns.

"I will if you'll let me do it the right way," she said, just when he
was thinking she would not answer him. She did not wait for his
assurance, once she had decided to accept the challenge, or the
invitation; she did not quite know which he had meant it to be.

"I'm going to bridle him first though," she informed him. "And you can
tell that star villain to back out of the way. I don't need him."

Still Burns did not say anything. He was watching her, studying her,
measuring her, seeing her as she would have looked upon the screen. It
was his habit to leave people alone until they betrayed their
limitations or proved their talent; after that, if they remained under
his direction, he drove them as far as their limitations would permit.

Jean went first and placed the saddle to her liking upon the ground.
"You want me to act just as if you were going to take a picture of it,
don't you?" she asked Burns over her shoulder. She was not sure
whether h